Friday, March 16, 2018

DAVID BROOKS: THE LIBERAL EQUIVALENT TO BEING TRUMP IS BEING A PROGRESSIVE

David Brooks, to his credit, believes that President Trump is immoral, and that his immorality is infecting the Republican Party:

Trump is a revolutionary figure not because he changed the G.O.P.’s position on trade or international engagement. He’s morally revolutionary....

Trump ... asked the Republican Party to accept the proposition that it doesn’t matter if your leader is a liar, a philanderer and a narcissist. It doesn’t matter if he is cruel to the weak and bigoted toward the outsider. What matters, when you’re in a death match in which the survival of your nation and culture is at stake, is having a bastard in charge who understands and is tough enough to win.

Needless to say, Brooks is telling us this in order to prepare us for a critique of the Democratic Party.

The question of 2018 is whether the Democrats will follow suit.

Really? Does it seem likely that Democrats are going to sell their souls to a corrupt, treasonous pathological liar and sexual predator who knows less about government than a high school freshman who's getting a B in civics? Please explain, David.

The question of 2018 is whether the Democrats will follow suit. The temptation will be strong. In any conflict the tendency is to become the mirror image of your opponent. And the Democrats are just as capable of tribalism as the Republicans, just as capable of dividing the world in self-righteous Manichaean binaries: us enlightened few against those racist many; us modern citizens against those backward gun-toting troglodytes. Listen to how Hillary Clinton spoke in Mumbai last weekend.

There’ll be a tendency this year to nationalize each of the congressional races, to focus on Trump and not the country’s actual problems, to push the tribal hot buttons that excite the passionate Resistance in the great culture war.

So, to David Brooks, being a progressive ideologue is as awful as Donald Trump's business malfeasance, personal amorality, political recklessness, scorched-earth assaults on enemies, and contempt for the national interest. Treason, larceny, sexual assault, and character assassination are the moral equivalent of wearing a pussy hat.

... Conor Lamb’s victory in Pennsylvania this week gives at least a glimmer of hope that the Democrats may go the other way.

... He campaigned in a way designed to bridge divisions, not exacerbate them.

... He embraced issues that grabbed from each political persuasion, for universal health care, against the tax cuts, but also for fracking, against the assault weapons ban, skeptical of the $15 minimum wage. He opposed both Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan in congressional leadership races.

In his failed run for a Georgia congressional seat last year, Jon Ossoff did many of the same things. He refused to embrace single payer and rejected tax increases on the rich. He said he was not a fan of Pelosi. Yet Brooks never wrote about Ossoff. Ossoff lost, obviously, but the party's embrace of Ossoff as well as Lamb gives the lie to the notion that the Democratic Party is on the verge of conducting Stalinist purges of moderates and launching a jihad against the American heartland. Brooks needs for that to be true -- otherwise, his entire thesis collapses.

Brooks believes that Lamb is morally extraordinary because he didn't sink to the Trumpian gutter:

[Lamb] emerges from a serious moral tradition. He is a Catholic who attended a parochial school run by the Christian Brothers....

Now it’s obvious that you would run to the center as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district. But it’s not obvious that you would keep your integrity in such a tight campaign. It’s not obvious that you would put real but unsexy issues like opioids first, above the cable TV symbolic ones. It’s not obvious that you would be restrained by democratic norms, when the president comes into your district and shreds them.

Moral character is always the same essential things. Putting a higher love, like nation, over a lower love, like party. Going against yourself — feeling that urge to lash out with the low angry insult, and instead rising upward with the loving and understanding response.

According to Brooks, a Democrats needs serious religious training in order to avoid behaving like Donald Trump. He tells us this even though ity's impossible to name a Democrat currently in electoral politics who acts remotely like Trump. Who would? I know Philippe Reines says they all should, but you have to be a moral monster to do that, and Democrats running for office just aren't like that -- yes, even the ones who don't go to church.

Also , note that Brooks believes that you can either care about opioids or be a committed progressive -- it's impossible to be solidly left and care about your community. That's preposterous.

The overt message of this column is that the Democrat didn't act like Trump in the Pennsylvania special election -- both sides didn't do it. The subtext is that both sides might, because Democrats are potentially as bad as the worst person who's ever been president, and the worst party that's ever had this much power.